> Unless you believe there is any mechanism to force a single cross-platform GUI toolkit on all developers - a belief that would make you basically insane - the reality is there will always be N different options for cross-platform development, depending on (a) which platforms you intend to cover (b) your own development history (c) subjective preferences (d) specific functionality that may be limited to specific toolkits.
The problem is not forcing people to do this or use that.
The problem is the quality and development experience is just _so bad_ that people are resorting to other options.
Don't get me wrong, the dev experience for web is terrible, but it's still light years ahead of legacy toolkits like qt/gtk/etc.
I think they're roughly the same in terms of dev experience. Major toolkits have good bindings for dynamic languages like JS and Python so C++ isn't a barrier. I think mostly what happened was Electron's pitch of "turn your web app into a desktop app almost for free" meant that web devs could stick with React rather than learning wx or Qt. There were a lot of web devs and web companies so this meant a lot of Electron apps where once there might have been native apps.
The problem is not forcing people to do this or use that.
The problem is the quality and development experience is just _so bad_ that people are resorting to other options.
Don't get me wrong, the dev experience for web is terrible, but it's still light years ahead of legacy toolkits like qt/gtk/etc.